Note 48:2 — Chapter II

Evelyn Abbott, History of Greece, i. 158 seqq. I cannot but suspect that the account of the diet of the Homeric chiefs—great meals of roast meat, and no fish—is a piece of deliberate archaism, which contradicts all we know of any historical Greeks from the earliest to the present days. The Greeks were probably never a meat-eating race, and even the early athletes trained on cheese (cf. my Rambles and Studies, p. 290). The poets knew all about fishing, for it appears in a simile, and yet in no case does fish, the great delicacy of Attic days, appear upon a Homeric table.